Jeff Bridges, Esquire, May 2011
"We're here for such a short period of time. Live like you're already dead, man. Have a good time. Do your best. Let it all come ripping right through you."
Kid Rock, Esquire, May 2011
"One thing I found out for sure in life is, don't hang out with assholes. Surround yourself with good people. Whether they're the best or not, people are capable of learning if they've got good hearts and they're good souls."
"You know you got the devil on this shoulder and you got the angel on this shoulder? When I'm on the road, this motherfucker never says nothing."
Muddy Waters on Paul Oscher, Undated
"He plays the soul I feel."
Of Former Major Leaguer and National League President Bill White, NYT, April 3, 2011
Former Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent: "Bill once told me 'I have a terrible problem with authority. I've never been able to get along with anyone in authority.' I think that explains a lot."
Matthew McConaughey, Esquire, April 2011
"A friend of mine said...'you're into commas. Every time you think you've stopped you always come out of it. Every time you think you've reached the end of that long dead-end street, you slip around the edge, past that stopping point, past the right angles,' and I thought: Yes, it's all continuation! Even if you're dying, that's a kind of continuation, because you move on. And you have to change. Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there's gonna come a time that you're gonna know: there was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it."
Rainn Wilson on his Baha'i faith, Esquire, April 2011
"Life is suffering. Life is not resistance to suffering. The point of life is to suffer. This is why we're here: We're here to suffer. I believe in a higher power that compassionately allows suffering for us as a race, to grow and mature. Of course he allows suffering."
Howard Stern, Rolling Stone, March 31, 2011
"
I definitely want to connect, but I don't want to connect fully. I want interaction but at a safe distance. I can only get so messy with people."
"There is an anger inside of me. Once in a while, I can douse it with some water, but it just never goes away. I don't know how to get rid of that. I had something to prove to the world, to my father, to every woman that never fucked me...I'm not saying I'm fully evolved now. I'm not Buddha...I get competitive. But that's no way to live. I'm tired of walking around angry. It's a burden. And that's why I'm trying to find balance."
Donald Sutherland, Esquire, March 2011
"The spirit of mankind is not going to help me through my death. My death is a lonely little journey that I'll take myself."
"Dalton Trumbo? He wrote 'Johnny Got His Gun.' He was one of the blacklisted writers. Spent time in prison. Lost everything. Got everything back. Wonderful fellow. The last thing he said to me was 'Don't forget to be happy.'"
Aaron Sorkin, Esquire, January, 2011
"The rules are all in a 64-page pamphlet by Aristotle called Poetics. It was written almost 3,000 years ago, but I promise you if something is wrong with what you're writing, you've probably broken one of Aristotle's rules."
"I desperately need the love of complete strangers. That's one reason I overtip. I love when the skycaps, waiters, and valets are happy to see me."
"I kind of worship at the altar of intention and obstacle. Somebody wants something. Something's standing in their way of getting it. They want the money, they want the girl, they want to go to Philadelphia - doesn't matter. And if they can need it, that's even better...The obstacle has to be difficult to overcome. And that's the clothesline that you hang everything on - the tactics by which your characters try to achieve their goal. That's the story you end up telling."
"When you're a hit, you get a little more elbow room and you walk with a bigger stick."
"A friend is somebody who says the same things to your face that they would say if you're not in the room."
"By the way, you don't have to necessarily always enjoy being with your friends. It's possible to have friends that drive you out of your mind. Don't you have friends that you've had since you were a little kid? And you constantly have to explain to people who're just meeting him: 'I've known him since the fifth grade. He really is a good guy. Trust me. Really, he's got a heart as big as Montana."
"I feel like if I'd gotten married once a year, every year since I was 25, there would never have been the same five groomsmen twice. Two new people would always be coming in."
Mary-Louise Parker, Esquire, January, 2011
"I'd rather have to put my teeth in a jar at the end of the day than Twitter."
"Running from something and running to something are the same thing."
"I like to pretend that I'm a tough guy. It's kind of an admission of defeat if I have to ask for help - or even kindness. But if it doesn't come, at some point I snap and demand it."
"I like to restructure the rules to make them fit my own needs."
Ted Danson, Esquire, January, 2011
"A friend is someone who will allow me to be a really bad friend and not hold it against me."
"Those who say, don't know. Those who know, don't say. That holds up over time."
Robert Redford, Esquire, January, 2011
"I was in a small charter plane...and the engines went out for nine minutes. You go through that checklist. Then you get down to what it's gonna feel like. What's it gonna feel like? I still wonder."
"I grew up in a pretty cynical environment. All my friends gave each other a horribly hard bad time. We'd destroy each other with criticisms, but for me it was a sign of friendship. If someone gave me a hard time, I'd say, 'Well, I guess he's my friend.'"
"Life is essentially sad. Happiness is sporadic. It comes in moments and that's it. Extract the blood from every moment."
"Speak out for what you believe and what you feel. Or don't. You have to live with yourself."
Mick Jagger, NYT, December 5, 2010
"I don't really subscribe to a completely normal view of what relationships should be. I have a bit more of a bohemian view. To be honest, I don't really think much of marriage. I'm not saying it's not a wonderful thing and people shouldn't do it, but it's not for me."
"Secretariat" Director Randall Wallace, NYT, November 7, 2010
"Horses, I think, are similar to women. They want to be admired and appreciated more than they want to be understood. They are magnificent, mysterious animals. And they're also dangerous; you have to take great care."
Keith Richards, Rolling Stone, November 11, 2010
"I still remember the smell of the orange trees in Valencia. When you get laid with Anita Pallenberg for the first time, you remember things."
"It was obvious that Brian [Jones] and Anita had come to the end of their tether. They'd beaten the shit out of each other. There was no point to it. I never really knew what the beef was. If i were Brian i would have been a little bit sweeter and kept the bitch."
'Most guys i know are assholes. I have some great asshole friends, but that's not the point....Friendship has got nothing to do with that. It's can you hang, can you talk about this without feeling any distance between you? Friendship is a diminishing of distance between people. That's what friendship is, and to me it's one of the most important things in the world. Mick doesn't like to trust anybody. I'll trust you until you prove you're not trustworthy. And maybe that's the major difference between us. I can't really think of any other way to put it. I think it's just something to do with being Mick Jagger, and the way he's had to deal with being Mick Jagger. He can't stop being Mick Jagger all the time. Maybe it's the mother in him."
Conan O'Brien, Rolling Stone, November 11, 2010
"I look at other people - Letterman's a perfect example - and I think, 'Oh, he's a precision instrument. And I mean that as a compliment. But myself, I'm not a precision instrument. I go out there and I try stuff and I move and I do things and when I hit a rich vein I jump into it and really go for it. And I let people in on my vulnerability. People know when something isn't going well, or if there's an awkward moment, and when I get excited and happy I move around a lot. There's that famous Marshall McLuhan quote where he said, 'Television's a cool medium.' And I always thought, 'If television's a cool medium, I'm fucked.'"
"But as badly as things went in the beginning - and this sounds weird - but I always wanted to be there more than anybody didn't want to be there...I'm very aware when I'm not right for something. So let's say I had somehow been made the quarterback for the New England Patriots, replacing Tom Brady. I would ask to be taken out of the game after my first hit. But no matter how hard I got hit on late-night television, I never wanted to be taken out."
Author: "O'Brien's humor is so relentlessly self-deprecating it's easy to overlook the fact that he also has a serious ego....Unlike, say, Letterman, whose comedy seems to come from a place of deep self-loathing, O'Brien acknowledges that underneath 'layers of questioning, doubting, double-checking, worrying,' he possesses a 'solid adamantium core of confidence.' He knows he's generally the funniest guy in the room."
Robert Smigel: "On Saturday Night Live, Conan and I got along right away because we had this work ethic in common, and we both have a melancholy side. We would go out to dinner a lot, but we wouldn't enjoy ourselves."
There's a famous magazine profile of Johnny Carson, which O'Brien loves, in which the writer Kenneth Tynan describes Carson as chatting at a cocktail party "with impersonal affability, making no effort to dominate, charm or amuse." Tynan goes on to quote an acquaintance of Carson's who says, "Socially, he doesn't exist. The reason is that there are no television cameras in living rooms. If human beings had little red lights in the middle of their foreheads, Carson would be the greatest conversationalist on Earth."
"The only thing I was always nervous about was not living up to what my potential might be."
Jon Hamm's Character Don Draper on Mad Men, October 2010
To his secretary while breaking open a bottle: "Make sure I don't over do it."
"Ok, how do I [know when that is]...it's hard to tell with you"
Garry Shandling, GQ, October 2010
"You want to know what the world is about? No one knows what to think. If we could just embrace not knowing for a second, we might have a chance. It's all right not to know."
"I have spent a lot of time studying the issue of relationships, how I grew up, my parents' influence on me. I've talked to a therapist, I've looked inward spiritually at myself, and what it seems to come down to is: that I'm a Sagittarius."
"My [boxing] trainer said 'You have an unusual rhythm of your own that's sort of, uh, no rhythm whatsoever. And yet that works for you because they can't figure you out.' So sometimes when i'm in the ring, it's like you can't tell whether I'm about to tell a joke, or throw a punch, or start a punch and not finish it, or pass out. So some guys can't read me. They come in close - just like when an audience leans in. And then I have a flurry."
Judd Apatow: "He always talked about how it's incredibly rare for people to say what they mean. People are lying a great deal of the time. [The Larry Sanders Show was about] what people are trying to project versus that they're actually feeling."
Arrested Development Creator Mitch Hurwitz on Will Arnett, GQ, September, 2010
"Will is like a child who's forced to act like a man wrapped in the body of a man who acts like a child."
Sylvester Stallone, GQ, September, 2010
"I just know it's a foregone conclusion that I'm going to end up in a very cold, dark place. I don't believe that we go anyplace. You make your heaven and hell right here, and you are what you leave behind. But don't think that you're going to change anything; you're not."
"[For my tombstone] I'd like to use a line from one of the movies. Like 'it's not how hard you hit, it's how hard you can get hit that makes all the difference in your life.'...I really feel the survivors are the ones with good jaws. Not everyone has a punch, but if you can keep taking it, quite often you can prevail."
"I didn't have a perfect childhood, but I'm a believer in this too: I wouldn't be here with a perfect childhood. So whatever trials and tribulations, it provided me with enough ammunition and anger and competitiveness and insecurity to keep forging ahead. So I tell people to embrace your frustration, your fears, because that's what makes life interesting. Nobody likes perfection; I want that flawed guy. He's there in spite of the flaws. And the hurts never go away. You can't get rid of memory."
Matt Weiner, Creator of Mad Men, Rolling Stone, September 16, 2010
"'Who am I? It's only the biggest theme in all of Western literature.'"
"Life's not fair. You get to a certain point where you're too old to be saying that, but it never stops being infuriating. No matter how much you rise to the level of a Don Draper, you never outgrow the temptation to escape into somebody else's identity."
"Mad Men is a constructed world for me to talk about how I feel about the world, for me to talk about my family, talk about my parents, talk about my fantasies, see my wish fulfillments, trash my enemies, vanquish my fears."
Oliver Stone, NYT, September TBD, 2010
"I might as well be myself. Everyone else is taken."
Robert Plant, NYT, September 5, 2010,
"I don't need to go anywhere I've been before. I keep ducking and weaving. Every time I do something else, I have no idea if it's going to work or where it's going to take me. I do it for the right reasons and continue to change as vividly as I did in that other band. I couldn't just go back to the mother lode and hit the same button every time."
Larry King, Esquire, September, 2010
"The three greatest words in the English language are not 'I love you'...[they] are: 'Leave me alone.'"
"When you get to my age you shouldn't have to do what you don't want to do."
Chuck Berry, Rolling Stone, September, 2010
Berry says he has been racing to write down as many of his ideas and thoughts about his favorite subjects - life, mathematics, philosophy and sexuality - as he can. "Nobody's going to know what I think after I'm gone. It's over with. So if it put my thoughts in the computer, somebody will take care of it."
"I'm a millionaire, but I cut the grass, and each time I cut it, it's my grass. And that is satisfying. [Every blade of grass tells a story, he says]. It's like a person. A blade is a blade. When it's cut in half, it dies for sure. But the half that isn't cut springs back to life."
"I play a slot machine and the day before yesterday I had four jackpots. I was sitting there waiting to see if i could get five. Now if that's greedy, I'm greedy. Like, I wonder if there's anything beyond raising the roof on a show. Is there more? And if so, I want to try!"
Where most people expect to see their whole lives or a vivid memory flash through their minds when they die, Berry says that won't be the case with him. "I wouldn't be having a memory. I would want to know what's next."
Dale Earnhardt, Jr., NYT, August 8, 2010
One of Earnhardt's greatest problems at Hendrick Motorsports has been his inability to communicate to his crew chief what's happening when his car during a race so his crew can make adjustments during pit stops. At DEI he was in a cocoon of family and friends who intuited his monosyllabic responses. According to Lance McGrew, Jimmie Johnson breaks down his car's handling down into 10 sections going into a corner. Dale's more old school. He'll just say, 'It's loose.' I have to prod him. He's not analytical. He doesn't relay what he thinks in words. When something's bothering him, I can see it in in his driving. It gets snatchier, he's not as smooth on the throttle or brakes."
Leonardo DiCaprio, Rolling Stone, August 5, 2010
"It's crazy how your mind will become this database to make you worry about things that are so arbitrary. I have a well organized life and I've put a lot of thought into the things that I do, and then you know, my stomach will be - I'll just be sitting there, totally anxious about something ridiculous. You have to to stop yourself during the day and say 'It's just not worth it.'"
"If you have the ability to convince somebody of something that you don't necessarily think is the case, it's a valuable asset. Not that I'm, like, a pathological liar, but we spend most of the day not fully being honest, you know?"
"In the movie Zebraland, there's a guy that talks a lot of trash, and a girl says, 'Why do you speak so loud? and he goes 'To be heard,' and I thought 'Wow, that's me when i was little.' I needed to be heard, and I was too little to get any respect."
"There's some insane statistic that 70 percent of people believe in angels. I'm not an atheist, I'm agnostic. What I honestly think about is the planet, not my specific spiritual soul floating around. I know that sounds slightly eco-boy, but I think about the idea that there's going to be a mass extinction, and then something else is going to evolve."
Of Bobby Cox, SI, July 26, 2010
"If you tracked down any of his players from those days, they would say the same thing all the other players did. They would say Bobby Cox was the best manager they ever had - showering them with praise in public, gently correcting them in private, cheering for them when nobody else would, fiercely defending them from every conceivable danger. The would help you create a composite sketch of Bobby Cox, and when it was done he would look remarkably like the perfect father."
On Helen Hunt, NYT, July 10, 2010
"I've long admired Helen as an actor who seemed kind of warm but kind of dark, kind of wry and mischievous but also kind of somber, and who can swing back and forth between those places."
Jimmy Stewart in Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life"
"Every man on that transport died! Harry wasn't there to save them because you weren't there to save Harry. Strange, isn't it? Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?"
Jon Favreau - Esquire, July 2010
"My grandfather always said he didn't care when he got ripped off for money. He said he was most offended when somebody took his time. I didn't understand that at first. But I do now."
"You tend to gravitate to the things you grew up with. So i like Carvel even though it might not be a gourmet ice cream. I just had it with someone...He said 'this is what you were craving?' Yeah because you grew up with it and and you live it."
Patti Smith - Offbeat, June 2010
"Religion almost implies rules and regulations. Spirituality doesn't imply rules and regulations, but religion is like a club; that's why i don't have a religion. I like churches, I like going into them, I pray, I draw comfort from them, I draw comfort from my prayers, but I don't want to be in any club and I don't want to have a bunch of guidelines for behavior or the way I'm supposed to pray or how much money I'm supposed to give so I don't have a religion."
On surfer Clay Marzo, - Rolling Stone, April 15, 2010
"When your own father misconceives you so badly, how can you hope that strangers will understand?"
"From his father: "He never really shared much or let you in, but I figured that was who Clay was."
Frank DeFord - SI - March 29, 2010
"[SI's managing director Andre Laguerre] was a fascinating paradox: He was almost constitutionally withdrawn , but among the friends he chose he was magnetic."
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